As the folks attending the 101st Grey Cup celebration on Sunday are making their way out of Mosaic Stadium at around 10 p.m., after either the Hamilton Tiger-Cats or the hometown Roughriders have hoisted the battered trophy, something very important will have happened to their beloved league.

The CFL once more go from a tiny eight-team loop to a slightly less tiny nine-team league for the first time since 2005.

That this town on the frozen white prairie, where the league is cherished and followed like nowhere else in Canada, will serve as a symbolic ground zero as the CFL takes yet another leap into an ambitious future is certainly apropos.

There isn’t another CFL city, quite frankly, where one is aware immediately upon arrival that the Grey Cup is happening here in quite the same way. And it’s damn cold, which feeds the mythology of this league, a league that has two dome stadiums left but almost certainly will be down to one soon, almost a symbolic returning to the elements.

We play three-down football in the cold up here, and kicked footballs were being flattened at practice on Thursday in minus-30 temperatures as several Tiger-Cats complained of frostbite. What George Reed and Ron Lancaster were playing through in 1970 is still the challenging backdrop for Darian Durant and Weston Dressler in 2013, and instead of complaining about it, it’s being celebrated in more exuberant fashion than ever before.

“It’s the Super Bowl times twenty when the Grey Cup’s in Regina,” said Hamilton quarterback Henry Burris.

So at a time of great confidence in this province and this league, getting back to nine teams — the CFL went from 13 in 1995 to nine in ’96, to eight in 1997, back to nine in 2002, back to eight in 2006 — hits the CFL heartland in a meaningful way.

Primarily, of course, they’ll be hoping Ottawa can pay the bills this time.

Safe to say that Ottawa’s new football venture, like all things Ottawa, will be viewed with some suspicion in these parts for some time. After all, it wasn’t so long ago they were holding Save The Riders telethons, but no one ever just gave up on the team, threw the keys on the CFL commissioners desk and headed to the airport.

No, they persevered, and now the Riders are the gold standard, the No. 1 brand in the league, and more profitable every season.

The timing for the Redblacks couldn’t have worked better. Not only is the infusion of oxygen that comes with a new franchise welcome, but Ottawa will bring with it a gorgeous new stadium that will fit in with a surge in new stadia around the league that already includes Winnipeg and Hamilton and should see a new building to replace old Taylor Field in this city by 2017.

“We couldn’t help but be a lot more excited about the CFL we’re coming into even compared to when we first started negotiating with the league back in 2007,” said Hunt.

The Redblacks will soon have jerseys and a head coach, and when the league holds its expansion draft on Dec. 16, the club will have eight import players and 16 Canadians to begin to build around.

“It’s a big job for two reasons,” said Ottawa GM Marcel Desjardins. “We have to do it right for us. But we have to do it right for the CFL because of the way previous experiments have gone in Ottawa.

“So on multiple levels, it’s an important thing.”

Desjardins should get two quarterbacks with CFL experience — hard not to believe Argonauts quarterback Zach Collaros could be one of them — and while Desjardins liked the original proposals for the draft better than the final version, he’s promising a good product next season.

“We strongly believe we’ll be able to field a competitive team,” he said. “What does that mean? We’ll be in most games, and maybe even finagle a playoff spot.”

Adding Ottawa to get back to nine teams — with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers again shifting back to the West Division from the east — has been a very slow and gradual process, and even here in Grey Cup week, Ottawa’s presence will be muted, at best.

Desjardins and Hunt are here, but there is no official Redblacks party, and no team garb to be purchased. No horse-before-cart this time around.

Ultimately, the Redblacks need to bring a lot more to the table than did Ottawa’s last football creation, the Renegades, in that team’s brief existence.

It seems likely they will, and just in time, too. As the league gets set to grow this weekend, the clock on Toronto’s CFL operation will begin ticking in earnest.

Who knows? We may be back to eight again sometime soon.

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